


To Reflect the Sky Above

by Gileonnen



Category: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood Feuds (Averted), Bragging about Horses, Dreams of Flight, Gen, M/M, Maps and Mythologies, Terrible Plans (Not at All Averted), The Perils of Classical Arabic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 19:50:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5468816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lawrence decides to steal an aeroplane, and quite by accident, he also makes off with Ali's heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Reflect the Sky Above

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xenakis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenakis/gifts).



> _Lawrence of Arabia_ is a rather free translation of _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ , which is itself Lawrence's rather free interpretation of the Arab Revolt. Nonetheless, in none of these canons (to the best of my knowledge) did Lawrence ever actually attempt to steal a Turkish aircraft.

It began (as it so often did, among the Howeitat) with a horse.

When al-Aurans returned from Cairo, there had been feasting in captured Aqaba for three reeling nights. Prince Faisal's fighters ate like men breaking a fast, and they drank clean water as though it were wine. There was singing in the streets; children wove garlands of flower and palm; the Howeitat held a horse race each night, and the winner bore away as much gold as he could carry in his kaffiyeh. There was a great box of gold in Aqaba now, and the Howeitat seemed intent upon emptying it as fast as ever they could.

In Cairo, Ali had learnt that _aureus_ was the Latin word for _golden_ , and when Aurans had come to Aqaba with a box of heavy coins on the back of an armored car, the word had sprung again to Ali's mind. _Aurans_ , the golden-haired bringer of gold: the men had sung his praises and shouted his name to the heavens. On that first night, Auda abu-Tayi himself had taken their celebrated Aurans by the face and kissed him soundly on each cheek, which both men immediately regretted.

By the third night, the box was no more than half full, and the luster of their triumph had faded--for none more so than for Auda. "I am a river to my people," he repeated, doleful as a martyr in his crown of wilting flowers, as he watched the golden guineas trickle through his fingers. Even Ali could see that he was meditating upon some plot to dam that river up.

At that night's race, Auda abu Tayi gifted his son with a black horse that moved like a vengeful storm over the dunes, and none cheered louder than he when his son plunged ahead of the lead rider and scooped up the winner's wreath.

"That was no kaffiyeh he filled for the boy," some of the Harith remarked, while they shared cigarettes on the mounting plate of a twelve-pound gun. "It was a whole robe! A tent!"

"Keep your eyes on the sea," Ali advised, "and leave the Howeitat to their scheming and their sham horse races."

At the table in his tent, though, Auda grew lavish in his triumph. His guests (among whom Ali and Aurans had the dubious pleasure of numbering) were treated to fresh figs and dates, plates of goat with lentils, beans doused in butter; Auda spoke in ringing tones of the greatness of the Arab nation, of the Howeitat, and even of Aurans, that djinn who had come from the desert to promise power beyond imagining.

"That old liar," Ali muttered against Aurans's ear.

"I am no more a devil than I am a god," Aurans answered. He looked well, or at least, he looked more alive than he had when he'd arrived in Aqaba with only one boy at his side. Now, Aurans wore a private smile that meant he was having a laugh at another's expense. Ali snorted in reply.

"You are a liar, too," he laughed, and he knew that he was daring Aurans to gainsay him. _Tell me that you are right to think yourself beyond the reach of fate,_ he thought. _Tell me, and I may believe it._

Now, Auda was praising his son, as though the boy had performed any great feat beyond being a light burden for the fleetest horse. "I say to you--" and here he indicated Ali and the Harith who enjoyed his hospitality "--I say that a camel may be the ship of the desert, but a good horse is the railcar! A camel rocks and sways over the dunes like a ship over the waves. Better to fly over the sands, and to travel so smoothly that you might be sitting in your tent!"

The last fortnight by the sea, it seemed, had made Auda an expert on ships.

"A horse may carry me, when I require speed or grace," Ali said coolly, "but a horse could not have crossed the Nefud."

Ali felt Aurans shift beside him. Leaning back, no doubt, for a better view of the combatants.

Auda lifted his chin. He wore a predatory look that Ali did not like in the least. "Auda abu-Tayi says that a Howeitat horse could have crossed the Nefud, and done it in half the time that it took the camels of the Harith. If a good horse is a railcar, a Howeitat horse is an aeroplane."

The goad was plain, but Ali could not resist the bait. He rose to his feet, nearly upsetting a tray of halved figs and a bowl of rosewater. "If a Howeitat horse is an aeroplane, then perhaps Auda abu-Tayi will simply fly to Gaza and drop bombs from his saddlebags."

Auda stood, too, lean and dangerous as a serpent. "You spit on Auda's hospitality, you blasphemous Harith--"

"Blasphemy, to say that your horses do not fly! But perhaps it is blasphemy to speak anything but praise of you, when you cite your own name as though you were quoting the _hadith_. It is easy to mock a man who always speaks of himself as 'Auda' or 'Auda abu-Tayi,' as though he spoke of a caliph!"

Auda's face went flat. "You speak dangerous words, little Harith." Ali marked where Auda's hands hung, half-flexed, at his sides. If he went for his knife, it would be a blood-feud, and this one would not be solved with Aurans's pistol.

"What if we stole an aeroplane."

All eyes turned toward Aurans, who lay back against his fur-draped saddle with that mad little light in his eyes that Ali was coming to know all too well. He held a half-eaten date in his right hand--how quickly he had learned not to eat with his left!--and he set it deliberately upon the ground as he rose.

In his white robes edged with gold, Aurans was a half-mythic creature. He was a pillar of salt and flame; he was an ancient statue scoured to pure marble; he was an Englishman, the strangest and most perilous of the three. He turned to take in the assembled onlookers, hands out so that his robe might spin out around him as he displayed himself. "Auda abu-Tayi says that the Howeitat horse is an aeroplane, and I have seen how the Howeitat flew across the sands when we took Aqaba. But Sherif Ali remembers well how the Turks rained fire on his people, threatening Prince Faisal's encampment and then fleeing unscathed. And shall we let them harass us again, in the moment of our triumph?"

He turned to the Howeitat, and raised his hands meaningfully. Auda took the cue sooner than the rest, and shouted, "No!"

"The British will send guns and dynamite from Cairo, but what good are our guns against the Turkish aeroplanes? What good is our dynamite?" Aurans grinned, wild and giddy. His grammar belonged to the Arabic of the Qur'an, a literary Arabic spoken by no tribe among the Bedouin, and it resonated among them like a prophecy. "But if we could turn the skies against them, the Hejaz would be ours!"

"Ours!" Ali shouted in answer. A dozen throats echoed him, then a dozen more.

"Medina would be ours!"

"Ours!" cried Auda, not to be outdone by the Harith.

"Mecca would be ours!" Aurans raised his hands to the sky, as though inviting Allah himself to join the reply.

The full-throated roar of men rose to the wheeling stars. In Aurans's eyes, there burned a strange blue fire like the light of inspiration.

When Ali beheld Aurans in the firelight, gleaming like burnished gold, it was not in him to call the admiration he felt _idolatry_. Madness, though--madness it must surely be, for it had never been in his heart before to take to the skies. But now the dream lay within him like a seed, and its roots would burst the stone of his old dreams until they cracked and crumbled.

Someone called for the Turks' maps, and someone else called for fresh meat, and the both of them jostled for a place at Auda's table as the feasting swelled anew.

Ali did not sit, though, even when Aurans resumed his seat. Instead, he gazed down at the table as Auda's men unrolled the map and weighted its corners with half-empty dishes. His eyes traced the outlines of what might one day be Arabia, from Cairo in the west to holy Mecca to the slopes of the mountains on Russia's southern edge. With the world spread out before him, it was not so difficult to imagine that these were all one land, and their people all one people.

At the apex of a long gulf, at the crest of the sun's anvil, Ali found Aqaba. He could not resist kneeling to brush his finger over the name, and as he did, his fingertips grazed Ma'an. _This is what it must look like from the sky_ , he thought. _Even the Nefud looks small, from above._

Aurans did not look small, although he sat well back from the table with half a fig clasped in his fingers. There were secrets in his eyes, of flight and victory--and that deepest secret of all, that of writing one's own fate upon the earth as easily as one might draw a map.

As their eyes met in the crowded tent, Ali longed to see what fate Aurans would write upon him.

That night, the sound of the waves lulled him to sleep, and he dreamed of a winged horse with white flanks and hooves of gold.

*

**Author's Note:**

> A few footnotes:
> 
>  **Names:** I have elected to use "al-Aurans" only once, thereafter preferring to drop the definite article. In _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ , Lawrence had the difficult task of Romanizing a number of Arabic proper names in a way that captured the region's pronunciation, and I have followed him in some cases (Howeitat) and abandoned him in others (Akaba).
> 
>  **Language:** In _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ , Lawrence credits Auda and his associates with helping to update Lawrence's literary Arabic with much-needed regional and colloquial Arabic. Ali might recognize Lawrence's speaking style from more mundane texts and treatises that he studied in Cairo, but for many of their other comrades, the grammar and vocabulary would be most familiar from the Qur'an.


End file.
